U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [474]
"Oh, Charley, forgive me for being so horrid." Next morning they lay happy in bed side by side after they'd had their breakfast and looked out of the window at the sea beyond the palm-trees, and smelt the freshness of the surf and listened to it pounding along the beach. "Oh, Charley," Gladys said,
"let's have everything always just like this." Their first child was born in December. It was a boy. They named him Wheatley. When Gladys came back
from the hospital instead of coming back to the apartment she went into the new house out at Grosse Pointe that stil smelt of paint and raw plaster. What with the hospital expenses and the furniture bil s and Christmas, Charley had to borrow twenty thousand from the bank. He spent more time than ever talking over the phone to Nat Benton's office in New York. Gladys bought a lot of new clothes and kept tiffanyglass bowls ful of freezias and narcissus al over the house. Even on the dressingtable in her bath-room she always had flowers. Mrs. Wheatley said she got her love of flowers from her grandmother Randolph, be-cause the Wheatleys had never been able to tel one flower from another. When the next child turned out to be a girl, Gladys said, as she lay in the hospital, her face looking drawn and yel ow against the white pil ows, beside the great bunch of glittering white orchids Charley had or-dered from the florist at five dol ars a bloom, she wished
-307-she could name her Orchid. They ended by naming her Marguerite after Gladys's grandmother Randolph.
Gladys didn't recover very wel after the little girl's birth and had to have several smal operations that kept her in bed three months. When she got on her feet she had the big room next to the nursery and the children's nurse's room redecorated in white and gold for her own bedroom. Charley groused about it a good deal because it was in the other wing of the house from his room. When he'd come over in his bathrobe before turning in and try to get into bed with her, she would keep him off with a cool smile, and when he insisted, she would give him a few pecking kisses and tel him not to make a noise or he would wake the babies. Sometimes tears of irritation would start into his eyes. "Jesus, Glad, don't you love me at al ?" She would answer that if he real y loved her he'd have come home the night she had the Smyth Perkinses to dinner in-stead of phoning at the last minute that he'd have to stay at the office.
"But, Jesus, Glad, if I didn't make the money how would I pay the bil s?"
"If you loved me you'd be more considerate, that's al ," she would say and two curving lines would come on her face from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth like the lines on her mother's face and Charley would kiss her gently and say poor little girl and go back to his room feeling like a louse. Times she did let him stay she lay so cold and stil and talked about how he hurt her, so that he would go back to the tester bed in his big bedroom feeling so nervous and jumpy it would take several stiff whiskies to get him in shape to go to sleep.
One night when he'd taken Bil Cermak, who was now
a foreman at the Flint plant, over to a roadhouse the other side of Windsor to talk to him about the trouble they were having with molders and diemakers, after they'd had a couple of whiskies, Charley found himself instead asking
-308-Bil about married life. "Say, Bil , do you ever have trou-ble with your wife?"
"Sure, boss," said Bil , laughing. "I got plenty trouble. But the old lady's al right, you know her, nice kids good cook, al time want me to go to church."
"Say, Bil , when did you get the idea of cal in' me boss? Cut it out."
"Too goddam rich," said Bil .
"S---t, have another whiskey." Charley drank his down.
"And beer chasers like in the old days. . . . Remember that Christmas party out in Long Island City and that blonde at the beerparlor. . . . Jesus, I used to think I was a little devil with the women. . . . But my wife she don't'
seem to get